Things that are awesome

1. leftover stuffing
2. kittens & puppies playing
3. pumpkin pie for breakfast
4. Nate's Michael Jackson charades dance
5. having all 3 sisters in one house-- it's a trifecta of awesome,
people!!!
6. ...see #5

and peace reigned in the kingdom

plentiful

We are now in possession of an unfortunately ginormous turkey. 24 lbs
of solid happy free-range Tom. So, if anyone doesn't have plans for
Tday, come on over!! We'll have plenty to go around...provided that I
can locate a roasting pan large enough to hold this sucker.

Kittehzz!!

because we are addicted to introducing new stress into our lives

We went out to a friend's farm for the weekend so that Adam could go deer hunting and I could force myself to not do work for 24 hrs straight. But instead of bringing home a deer we brought back a kitten!

His name is Bismark. He weighs 2.5 lbs and is a purring machine.

Moxie is not totally opposed to the idea, but she's still trying to figure out what it all means.

for Karina

The proposal that ate my fall is done.

$15K of blood, sweat and tears.

it's the little things

Cute chinese post-its with kitties on them can even make spatial statistics fun!

Grant deadline tomorrow.

Last dash editing of methods and then I'm done!

my procrastination skills are wicked

Sites I usually frequent for procrastination purposes that I've left high and dry in the past few weeks:

-blogger

-nytimes Science Times on Tuesdays

-etsy

-various shopping (for home or self) sites where I fill up the cart with everything I like and then quickly close the window before I actually buy anything.

-craigslist -- the ULTIMATE procrastination zone

The one I can't shake:

-google reader

In addition to the long list of random blogs I read, I also subscribe to the RSS feeds from all the journals that I'm supposed to be keeping up with. Now all the abstracts for new articles feed into my Reader page. Then when I feel the need to procrastinate by going to catch up on all the blogs that I follow, I can make sure that I'm also perusing recent articles that I should be reading anyway. It is still taking time and brain power away from the thing that I'm actually supposed to be doing, so in that way it is still procrastination. But if it wasn't for that I would probably never find the time to scan the abstracts of all of these journals every week.

Moral of the story: fill your feed-reader with things you should be reading anyway and then you can traipse even farther down the path of denial about your procrastination.

GET TO WORK!!!

11pm sunday

you'll note the presence of 3 coffee cups & a wine glass...

Yeah, I haven't been posting much lately.

I blame it entirely on my new No Procrastination plan, a subset of my larger plan to Just Do the Work and Get it Over With.

Big grant deadline this coming Fri and I've tried to be all nose-to-the-grindstone about it and not allow myself to flit around online wasting time. Which has sort of worked, but my brain is wily. I seem to have supplanted obvious online procrastination with the more insidious kind that involves getting sidetracked into easier and less important work. That way I get to say "hey! I'm totally not procrastinating right now! This work needs to get done too!" Which is true, but it is definitely not the highest priority.

So, anyway, that was me last night, trying to focus on turning out one more draft before the weekend was up. I made it with one hour to spare.

__________

Ahhhh!!!

November, I salute you.

today's fellow commuters

1. short guy. tidy suit, untidy goatee. honda fit. windows down, hip hop blaring, cigarette dangling.

rearview-mirror-hung rosary.

2. 4 teenage girls, baby in a car seat.

rusty chevy, fat joint.

3. van full of nuns!

Only two of the three were amusing.

trying to spark the writing fire

I'm sitting in the eye of a maelstrom of stress.
One huge grant deadline staring me in the eye and a massive case of writer's block.
Classwork piling up all around me.

The goal this week: WRITE. Just get it out. Make it happen.
I LIKE grant writing. Usually. I thrive in the creativity and optimism of proposal writing.
But this one is hard and I'm sliding all over, can't get a foothold.
Hope putting it out there like this will force me to stop listening to the voices in my head and just make things happen.

Ready? GO!